Véronique Gens, Münchner Rundfunkorchester & Hervé Niquet
Biography Véronique Gens, Münchner Rundfunkorchester & Hervé Niquet
Véronique Gens
After having dominated the Baroque scene for more than a decade, Véronique Gens went on to establish a solid international reputation and is now considered one of the finest interpreters of Mozart and the French repertory.
One of the flagship roles of her career, Donna Elvira in the production of Don Giovanni by Peter Brook and Claudio Abbado at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, brought her worldwide recognition. Her repertory comprises the leading Mozart roles (Countess, Vitellia, Fiordiligi etc.) and the great roles of tragédie lyrique (including Iphigénie en Tauride, Iphigénie en Aulide and Alceste) but also heroines of a later period such as Alice Ford (Falstaff), Eva (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Madame Lidoine (Dialogues des Carmélites) and Missia (La Veuve joyeuse). Véronique Gens also gives numerous concerts and recitals in a wide-ranging repertory all over the world, notably in Paris, Dresden, Berlin, Beijing, Vienna, Prague, London, Tanglewood, Stockholm, Moscow, Geneva and Edinburgh.
She has performed on the world’s foremost operatic stages, among them the Opéra National de Paris, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Vienna Staatsoper, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Liceu in Barcelona, the Teatro Real in Madrid, De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam and the Aixen-Provence, Salzburg and Glyndebourne festivals.
In 1999, she was voted Vocal Artist of the Year at the Victoires de la Musique Classique. Her many recordings (more than eighty CDs and DVDs) have received several international prizes: most recently, her album of French mélodies, Néère won a Gramophone Award in 2016, while Visions obtained an International Classical Music Award and an International Opera Award in 2018. Also La Reyne de Chypre by Halévy obtained a Gramophone Award in 2019, in the Opera category.
Véronique Gens is a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
Hervé Niquet
pursued his musical studies with Marie-Cécile Morin, a former pupil of Marguerite Long and Maurice Ravel who was friend of Samson François. Due to this artistic imprint searching for the original intentions of the composer his painstaking musical activity developed complying strictly the original manuscript of the musical works.
Following his widespread education as a harpsichordist, organist, pianist, singer, composer, choir-master and conductor, Hervé Niquet collected essential experience as a vocal-coach at the Opéra National in Paris. Especially when working with choreographers like Rudolf Nureyev and Serge Lifar he evolved into an expert of musical sources off the beaten track of traditional interpretations.
In 1987 he founded Le Concert Spirituel intending to revive the great French motet. Le Concert Spirituel has meanwhile won recognition in the international music-world as one of the leading ensembles performing baroque music and focussing its repertory on different styles and genres from sacred music to symphony and opera. The ensemble thus also discovered and revived totally unknown works by French, English and Italian composers of that period.
Hervé Niquet meanwhile also conducts main international orchestras with the same wholeheartedness when playing the 19th and early 20th century repertory. He is convinced that French music remained unique throughout the centuries. As a musical pioneer Hervé joined the formation of the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de musique romantique française in Venice 2009, a foundation he meanwhile managed to realise numerous projects with. He took part in numerous major re-discoveries, conducting Herculanum by Félicien David, Dimitri by Victorin Joncières, La légende des ours by Marie Jaëll and La Reine de Chypre by Fromental Halévy.
With passionate enthusiasm for opera Hervé Niquet frequently conducts stage-productions, either with Le Concert Spirituel or as a guest-conductor. He has worked with stage-directors of most diverse styles such as Mariame Clément, Georges Lavaudant, Gilles and Corinne Benizio (alias Shirley and Dino), Joachim Schlömer, Christoph Marthaler or Romeo Castellucci (Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in 2014 at the Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie in Brussels) and Christian Schiaretti (Rameau’s Castor et Pollux 2014 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris).
When he was a musical director of the Vlaams Radio Choir and first guest-conductor of the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra, he intensely involved bith ensembles in a recording-programme in co-operation with Palazzetto Bru Zane focussing on the recording of cantatas from the Prix de Rome. So far works by Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gustave Charpentier, Max d’Ollone and Paul Dukas have been published as well as opera rarities by Victorin Joncières and Félicien David (Herculanum, awarded an Echo Klassik in 2016).
Furthermore his personal commitment concerning next generation educative initiatives in music (Académie d’Ambronay, Jeune Orchestre de l'Abbaye aux Dames, Schola Cantorum, CNSMD de Lyon, McGill University in Montreal) as well as master-classes and lectures are of greatest importancce for him. It is an essential part of his professional engagement to spread and to forward the results of his research and interpretation, the most updated discoveries of musicology and both reality and demands of a musician’s life.
In 2019 Hervé Niquet was awarded a honorary prize from the prestigious "Deutsche Schallplattenkritik".
Hervé Niquet is Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
